DETROIT — Michigan’s primary election was more than two weeks ago, but many voters, especially African-Americans, are still reeling from one particular result:
In January, there will be no Black members of Congress from Detroit for the first time since Charles Diggs was elected in 1954. Blacks made up less than one-fourth of the city’s population then, and are nearly 80 percent of the city now.
This happened, of course, because both districts have strong white minority populations, and multiple candidates of color decided to run in the August 2 Democratic primary, splitting the Black vote in what had been an open seat, one so heavily Democratic that no Republican is likely to ever win in November.
“Disenfranchised,” Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, who is African-American, snorted last week. “Although we had the power to prevent this, we were unable to unify to use it. And this is what we are left with,” the longtime county mayor said sourly in a column he wrote for the Detroit Free Press.
By “this” he meant that next year, everyone in Detroit will all almost certainly be represented by either Shri Thanedar, a 67-year-old immigrant from India, or by Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim already in Congress whose family is Palestinian.
Evans did try hard to prevent that from happening — not, he has said, because he is “anti-white or any other race,” but because he felt that African-Americans “are much more likely to have their voices heard and their needs addressed when they are represented by someone from their own community.”
Indeed, he and some other Black leaders attempted to get voters to coalesce around a remarkably attractive candidate: State Sen. Adam Hollier, an army veteran who is the son of a firefighter who put himself through Cornell and the University of Michigan.
Most political leaders and newspapers endorsed him as well. But he lost to Thanedar, because seven other Black candidates, six with significant name recognition, got in the race. Thanedar, a millionaire entrepreneur who spent his own fortune lavishly, won a few white blue-collar suburbs the district includes by huge margins.
That made the difference.
But County Executive Evans is probably wrong to think Detroit’s African-American leadership could have prevented the result. Politics makes for powerful egos and the capacity for self-delusion, and there’s no way to stop someone from running.
However, there is a way to prevent situations like this – and to help ensure that the result is more representative of the people’s will:
Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV – sometimes also called Instant Runoff Voting, or IRV, though that term is becoming less popular.
Here’s how it works: In its most simple form, voters choose a candidate — and then pick a second choice. After the votes were counted, if no one has a majority, the second-place votes cast by people who backed the candidates who finished third or lower are redistributed among the two front-runners.
In more complex systems, like that used to elect the mayor of New York City, voters are asked to rank the top five candidates, and votes are then allocated according to a more mathematically complex system, though the result is normally the same.
Those familiar with Detroit politics think it is extremely likely that enough of the 48 percent who backed other candidates would have ranked Hollier as their second choice to elect him.
But we will never know. We do know that RCV is beginning to catch on nationwide, at least in a small way. A number of communities in many states (though not Ohio) use it in local elections, including Ann Arbor, Michigan, which adopted it last year.
In five southern states where runoff elections are held, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, RCV is used for voters who send in overseas absentee ballots, since they probably wouldn’t have time to vote again.
In Maine and Alaska, RCV has recently been approved for use in presidential elections, if no candidate has a majority in the state—or in the case of Maine, for the presidential vote in individual congressional districts, since the state, like Nebraska, allocates its electoral votes by congressional district.
Could RCV ever catch on nationwide? Officials of minor parties like the Greens and Libertarians have told me they love the idea. As it is now, many people say they’d like to support those parties — but on Election Day, go back to the major party they hate least, since they think the minor party they like has no chance of winning.
But RCV would take away that fear, since they could cast a second round vote. Republicans tend to oppose RCV, perhaps because it is probable that had it been in use in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have won that state and the Presidential election.
However, had it been in use nationwide in 1992, it is possible, though not very likely, that President George H.W. Bush would have beaten Bill Clinton.
Earlier this year, a dozen members of the Michigan House of Representatives, all Democrats, introduced a bill that would make it easy for all Michigan communities to allow Ranked Choice Voting.
Republicans currently control both houses of Michigan’s legislature, and they haven’t done anything to move the bill towards a vote. State Rep. Regina Weiss, the main sponsor, said she suspected that would happen, but wanted to get the idea before more people.
And one of the bill’s sponsors was — freshman State Rep. Shri Thanedar, who, thanks to there not being RCV in Michigan, likely will be going to Congress next year. Who said that irony was dead?
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
